Assessing Narrativity in the Lyric Speech Instance: Dialogical Plot and Progression in E. A. Boratynskii’s 'Sumerki'

• In Event: Beginnings and Endings in Russian Poetry: Progressions, Portrayals, Potentials

Abstract

This paper seeks to refine a model of lyric narratology that locates the primary plot-function of the poetic text in its dialogical orientation—that is, in the pragmatic psychodrama that the text instantiates between author, speaker, and reader. Framing lyric as a delicately emplotted encounter between consciousnesses, it investigates the discursive means by which traditional functions of plot-coherence (particularly those of “progression” and “tellability”) are either manifest or circumvented when a poetic text is not constituted by discrete, causally sequenced, in-text events. To this end, it attempts a pragmatic analysis of the lyric speech instance undergirding E. A. Boratynskii’s 1842 collection, Sumerki—assessing the means by which contact with the text might progressively shape a reader into a felicitous participant in its dialogical activity, and accounting for the utility of “plot” as a framework for describing such a process. In so doing, this paper will contextualize the lyric narrativity of Boratynskii’s latest work within the broader developmental tendencies of the Russian Romanticism, and permit us to evince the logic of dialogical contingency even in poetic speech that is consciously hermetic.

Author

• Zachary J. Deming, Columbia U